The new PressFriendly: Smarter media outreach

When we launched PressFriendly 20 months ago, we had a simple goal: to make PR easier for early stage startups. These startups were plagued with an almost unwinnable paradox, either try (often unsuccessfully) to get coverage on their own or hire a consultant or agency that they really couldn’t afford. So, we launched PressFriendly to help bridge the gap. In part, we’ve been successful. We’ve worked with more than 500 startups that have gotten coverage as a result of working with us. However, it would be hard for us to say that we made PR easier, we just made it easier for a small segment of a small market.

One of the fundamental reasons that PR is hard is that there are few good tools to help to help a media relations pro be good at their job. Press release software is clunky and expensive, and press releases are mostly ignored. Media databases are expensive and about as intuitive as rocket science.

As a result, many PR pros spend their lives in Excel spreadsheets and their inbox. Creating their own media lists and updating them by hand. Then pitching reporters via email and hoping for a response. Since there’s 5 PR people for every 1 reporter, responses are slim. And let’s be honest, even though media pitching is an important part of the process, it’s really the storytelling and strategic planning that most PR people enjoy. Pitching is just a necessary evil.

So when we started to have more and more media relations pros using PressFriendly and asking for additional features so they could use our product on a day-to-day basis, we listened. We created a tool that streamlines the pitching process and gives immediate feedback. We created tools for sharing media lists and for tracking pitches. And we’re just getting started….

For the past year and a half we’ve been building media lists using machine learning algorithms for tech startups. Over the coming months we’ll be rolling out automated and custom media lists for PR pros no matter the field. Media outreach is a thankless job, we want to make it easier.